Toronto police officers help woman deliver baby in back seat of taxi

TORONTO — One of the Toronto police officers who delivered a baby in the back of a taxi cab early Saturday said it was quite a feeling.

"It's not every day you can say you helped deliver a baby," Const. Colin McLaughlin said in a phone interview Saturday night.

"When I walked into work last night I wasn't expecting something like that to happen."

McLaughlin, a 26 year veteran on the force, was on the night shift at an east end precinct when a call came in at around 1:20 a.m. from a paramedics dispatcher saying a taxi cab with a woman in labour was about to arrive at his station.

McLaughlin went outside followed by Staff Sgt. Kim O'Toole to see what they could do and spotted the cab.

"I just walked up to the passenger side and looked in the back window and sure enough there was a woman lying on the back seat," he said. "You could see the baby's head."

McLaughlin said he just reached in to support the baby's head as O'Toole told the woman to push.

"It all happened so fast, I just heard her say 'push' and then it was literally one push and the baby came out and I was fortunate enough to be there to catch it."

With the baby in his arms McLaughlin said he had a brief anxious moment.

"When the baby came out he wasn't making any noise and then after a few seconds he started to cry but then he stopped crying and I'm like 'oh oh,'" McLaughlin recalled.

Paramedics arrived on the scene almost immediately and the infant was fine, the whole thing lasted about three minutes McLaughlin said.